MediaSavvy

Shortly after ranting that media properties to start thinking bigger and stranger if they’re going to succeed, I came across Jeff Jarvis’s spot-on analysis of why print advertising was never the right model for online success and the variety of opportunities that exist for media properties to improve their top and bottom lines.

Jeff says that print advertising worked as a business because there was a limited supply of space. But it also worked as a business because it was staggeringly inefficient. A Realtor had to buy access to a million readers to reach to two dozen who were looking for a neighborhood open house. That model has been broken for at least five years.

He has some great suggestions for new kinds of businesses for media companies. You should read his whole list, but here are my takes on some of them:

• Empowering new advertisers and partners: Google and eBay have empowered genuinely new businesses. Look beyond your traditional customers for new business opportunities. One reason that Google and eBay have succeeded at this is that they’ve made it possible for their customers to serve themselves, and consquently they’ve driven the price lower by orders of magnitude.
• Offering new services to marketers: The Houston Chronicle is doing this today. Their goal is to be the digital agency for their community.
• Creating content and advertising networks to reduce costs and increase revenues: I’ve been writing about this for more than a year and I don’t believe we’ve scratched surface of the opportunities and threats created by networked media.
• Getting into new lines of business: Should local media get into the real estate business? Now is exactly the right time to get into a business that has been dominated by a cartel. Even if newspapers survive the coming storm, do they really think that their real estate advertisers will return? Really?

The bad news is that nearly all initiatives will fail and only a few will prosper. And you can’t wait around until it becomes obvious what’s going to work. Once you notice someone having success, he’s going to be difficult to unseat in the market he created. To succeed in the current chaosm, you must experiment, keep costs low, watch what others are doing, and take a portfolio approach to innovation management.

You can export Keynote slides to a Quicktime file in the appropriate dimensions and embed the Quicktime of your Keynote deck in your blog. Just select File/Export, and follow the prompts. You can use hyperlink controls to allow users to navigate the deck inside of Quicktime. I discovered this technique last night when I was writing an analysis of the 2008 elections for Coastsider.

This is easier, faster, cleaner, and offers more control than exporting to PDF and embedding via Scribd or Docstoc. I especially like Scribd for embedding PDF’s, but this is a better format slide shows than PDF.

It’s cheaper and easier than creating the slides in 280 Slides. 280 Slides is really cool, but this you can do this on your desktop, own an archival copy of your deck, and don’t have to pay for it.

It’s better than using Flash, Scribd, Google or whatever to embed PowerPoint, because you don’t have to use PowerPoint.

And it’s a faster and more space efficient than taking screen grabs and embedding them as JPEG’s, which has been my fallback for embedding Keynote graphics.

2008 was a watershed year in my media habits.

In video, things came to a head when Comcast mistakenly cancelled by cable television service, instead of merely canceling my “high speed” (sic) Internet service. This echoed the scene six months earlier when, after weeks of trying to get someone to install Internet service, a Comcast guy showed up on my doorstep declared, “I’m here to disconnect your Internet service.”

We no longer have cable television and in Montara we’re beyond the reach of broadcast television.

My family discovered we don’t need regular TV any more. Between Netflix DVD’s and instant play for movies and HBO series; iTunes for Madmen and The Office; Hulu for John Stewart, Steven Colbert, and 30 Rock; MSNBC for streaming coverage of election night; YouTube for kittens and poisonous snakes; our own DVD’s for kids’ movies and The Simpsons; and the blogs for news highlights — we have more video on tap than we can possibly watch. Meanwhile, we’re more thoughtful about what we watch. And we still don’t have a Tivo, Roku, AppleTV, MediaCenter PC, or any other box on top of our TV.

I stopped listening to commercial radio a while ago, but missed the sense of discovering new music. In 2008, just as I was beginning to get bored of putting my music collection on shuffle, I found a host of new ways to get music. Streaming music from iTunes to my living room stereo was never appealing until Apple release its iPhone Remote software. Now it’s indispensible. I’ve been relying heavily on listening to KCRW and KKJZ, both of of them 400 miles away in LA, via iTunes. And now I can stream them over the cellular network to my iPhone with any of several radio applications. I’ve discovered more new music this year than in the last five thanks to Pandora (and KCRW) on my desktop and on my iPhone. Between that and Apple’s new Genius playlists I don’t have any time to listen to all those podcasts I’ve downloaded, except for Le Show and Ted Talks video.

The best part is that none of this is revolutionary. It has been coming for a long time. And now it’s part of everyday life for millions of consumers. Happy new year!

It’s no surprise that local television stations are under pressure, with increased competition for local audiences from cable and the current economic…um…opportunity.

Without actually citing a source, WSJ reporter Martin Peers declares that the problem is overcapacity and the solution is to let top stations in the local market merge to “reduce overcapacity”:

That means shuttering weaker stations and consolidating ownership of others in individual markets to allow for greater cost-cutting. One of the biggest costs is local news operations, which can account for between 25% and 33% of net revenues. Allowing one top station to buy another top station would spread such costs across a bigger revenue base. Regulators might consider relaxing ownership limits given the industry’s parlous state.

I can understand why this serves the purposes of the licensees, but it does not serve the interests of the communities they’ve been licensed to serve.

Consider this radical alternative: insist that to hold a local broadcast license you have to produce local programming. Can’t make money doing that? Sell the license to someone who can. Enforce the conditions of the license and let the market do its magic. Keep or even reduce the limits on the number of stations a single owner can hold to lower the price even further and to keep ownership in the community.

Reducing the price of a local broadcast license would encourage innovation in programming and particularly in journalism at a time when the entire value chain of video production is under attack from smart suppliers.

Keeping the price of licenses high — particularly at the cost of reducing the amount of journalism created in the local community — only serves the current licensees, who’ve already had their payday. Maybe we can encourage them to cut their losses and put local stations back in the hand of local entrepreneurs.

The folks who publish pMachine, an excellent inexpensive ($45 noncommercial) content management system, has announced a new cms called Expression Engine. When I predicted in December that blog packages would begin to evolve into cheap and powerful CMS’s, I didn’t think it would start to come true so soon.

It seems to take the functionality that makes pMachine special and takes it to the next level, with a completely rewritten backend.

After spending six months creating a site with pMachine, I’m very happy with it (flexible, powerful, easy to use). It has made it possible for me to build a user-written community site without resorting to a system that required me to own a server or learn perl (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Expression Engine appears to take the lessons Rick Ellis learned by creating and supporting pMachine and puts them together in a product that is powerful and more extensible.

I haven’t used it yet, because I’m too far into my pMachine project, but if I were looking for a low-end CMS, I would include pMachine on my must-review list.

I’m sure you’re expecting some new postings for the new year. Right now, I’m on vacation. I’ll be back to posting on a regular basis next week.

Mitch Ratcliffe notes that the Financial Times has made much of its subscription-only content available free to users of Yahoo and MSNBC. The FT is arguably one of the few global print brands that should be able to charge for its content.

Mitch wonders whether the message is that the future belongs to syndication, rather than subscriptions. The problem, as Mitch concedes, that the revenues from syndication would maybe cover the cost of a single reporter.

This story may also demonstrate the value of context. Is FT content presented in an FT-only context worth more than FT content presented in a Yahoo context?

Print publishers are clearly moving once again in the direction of charging for content. More publishers are willing to stand up and say that content should no longer be free. And ome publishers are taking the half-assed measure of charging for “premium” content or archives.

Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Plenty of publishers still stand by free content and free archives. Knight-Ridder is making money with free news. The San Francisco Chronicle still doesn’t charge for archives. As the online advertising market picks up and the paid content market stagnates, these companies are going to put some space between themselves and those who want to charge for news. I’ll have more to say soon about why charging for archives is dead wrong.

Peter Krasilovsky of Borrell Associates make the point that the Internet is a disruptive technology. He’s right, and every publisher who has read Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma knows it. Christensen tells us that disruptive technologies are about more than cost reduction.

Disruptors have entirely new cost structures. Online publishers have no unions; no capital tied up in real estate, vehicles, and printing presses; no demands from shareholders for 25% profit margins; and no per-reader delivery costs.

Disruptors don’t simply take market share. They create new markets. You can’t defeat a disruptor by bundling print with online, bring your print advertisers to the net, or using the Internet to serve your existing readers. The Net fragments and aggregates markets. Metro dailies are not only competing with national publishers, but with community and neighborhood micropublishers.

Disruptors change the way we think about the relationship between price and performance. Publishers may think that you get what you pay for with a free Weblog. But the time spent reading blogs comes out of somebody’s readership. Why are we seeing more publishers charging just as blogging becomes both a threat and an opportunity?

Christensen advises that companies under attack from disruptors have two options: create your own disruptor or buy one.

But whatever you do, don’t try to compete by using your core business as a base of operations. That’s a losing strategy, and that’s what’s behind the renewed drive to charge for content online.

Slate took in more money than it spent last quarter. That doesn’t mean they’ve paid back the $20 million that Microsoft invested in them or justified all the free promotion that MSN gave them, but it’s great news for a number of reasons.

• It’s remarkable that they did it in the very slow first quarter of the year. That bodes well for them as the online ad market warms up.
• Microsoft is a lot less likely to pull the plug at some point now that they’re not losing more money every day they operate.
• They did it by producing thoughtful content.
• It gives us some hope that Salon will be able to make it past their current difficulties.
• This should give some encouragement to those who believe that we’ll all be better off if Web content is free.

Congratulations, Slate!

According to Dow Jones, subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal Online increased 5.5% to 675,000 in the last year.

While this is a pretty good rate for a financial site in the midst of a recession, it is certainly slower than the forecast growth in online content and services in general, or perhaps even the potential growth in online advertising this year.

The Journal seems to be seeking new revenue with special editions of the site. We can probably expect them to be more creative an aggressive about generating revenue in 2003.